41–50 of 61 posts
Why do they use 12nm process node as opposed to SMIC 5nm or 7nm? Too expensive?
Does someone know what reference size to take for those SMC nanometers? It may sound irrational to ask this kind of question, but marketing killed the meaning of "nm" a long time ago. As reference, through electron microscope the sizes of Intel 14nm seems equivalent to AMD.TSMC 7nm [1] [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/272489/intel-14-nm-node-compared...
I’d love to get my hands on one of these. They’re MIPS machines that are on-par with the Intel core i3 14100. Loongson is also involved with Deepin Linux, so they’re attempting to build out a Chinese-native technology stack. While I generally don’t care for things under control of the CCP due to surveillance concerns, I do love competition for bringing about new tech innovation. We’re now getting back to the 80s/90s…
It is the golden age if you are a Chinese chip designer or operating systems engineer; getting to reinvent/rebuild the whole computing stack.
If they can keep up with the AMD and Intel CPUs they list, then that's actually pretty impressive and actually useful. There is a lot of people still daily driving 5 - 10 old processors just fine, it's absolutely plenty for a office desktop or even light development work. I would like to see actual benchmarks though.
The third generation is noisy because it is in a small format case and with very deficient ventilation that I can't solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SMIC 7nm doesn’t scale just yet.
It scaled well enough for the Kirin 9000s. But that's probably why Loongson isn't on it, capacity is probably being spent on Huawei's next chip.
For a meager 1.6 million phones sold to date.
Again, 7nm is a fantastic milestone for a forge that does not have access to newer ASML equipment, but context matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's Loongarch, some sort of MIPS + RISC-V.
Wikipedia [1] has some more details, but not too many on the main page itself. Also from the top of that page I learned that "Loongson" means "Dragon Core" which to me as a westerner makes it sound very clearly Chinese (because dragons) but also a lot cooler (because ... dragons!). Nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#LoongArch
They're unrelated things. A Chinese dragon is more like a unicorn than a western dragon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia [1] has some more details, but not too many on the main page itself. Also from the top of that page I learned that "Loongson" means "Dragon Core" which to me as a westerner makes it sound very clearly Chinese (because dragons) but also a lot cooler (because ... dragons!). Nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#LoongArch
Associating China with dragons seems like such a lucky PR win to me. How many countries are, outside of that country, associated with any mascot at all, let alone such a badass one? Also it seems appropriate that the Western concept of a dragon is much less friendly than the Chinese one -- at least, judging from the dances.
I remember the Loongson MIPS laptop made headlines many years ago. Richard Stallman even used one for a while. It got a lot of attention among my hacker space fellows, but I don't remember why. Was it an open hw design or something?
It was a MIPS little endian, which is also very good. I can't remember if it was fanless or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It scaled well enough for the Kirin 9000s. But that's probably why Loongson isn't on it, capacity is probably being spent on Huawei's next chip.
> It scaled well enough for the Kirin 9000s. For a meager 1.6 million phones sold to date. Again, 7nm is a fantastic milestone for a forge that does not have access to newer ASML equipment, but context matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia [1] has some more details, but not too many on the main page itself. Also from the top of that page I learned that "Loongson" means "Dragon Core" which to me as a westerner makes it sound very clearly Chinese (because dragons) but also a lot cooler (because ... dragons!). Nice. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson#LoongArch
Chinese dragon = snake with four legs. It can fly (magically). Western dragon = dino with wings. It can fly. They're unrelated things. A Chinese dragon is more like a unicorn than a western dragon.